future of written english

"Chinese"

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/12/chinese

The uncertainty surrounding the status of Beijing Mandarin at the time is highlighted by a meeting of linguists in 1913 to decide upon the new official language, at which the standard of choice was not the speech of the capital, but an artificial language incorporating the maximum number of distinctions found in the major dialects (including voiced stops, the entering tone, and the apical/laminal distinction before the palatal glide), envisaged as a compromise between north and south. But it soon became clear that no one, not even the linguists themselves, were capable of speaking this linguistic Frankenstein, and the movement failed miserably.